Put faux uproar into context

The great Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray, whose 20th century reflections on religion and American democracy still are without equal, once wrote that “the law must countenance many evils that morality forbids.”

If that sort of nuanced religious thinking seems somehow novel, it isn’t because it’s absent from contemporary Catholicism’s moral reasoning. It is, however, ignored in most of the mainstream American news media’s coverage of the church.

A perfect case in point is the way much of the press has handled the ongoing faux controversy over whether Roman Catholic officeholders who have cast votes favoring abortion rights ought to be denied Communion by their clergy. (Substitute Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, the Democrats’ presumptive presidential nominee, for “officeholder” and you’ve got the real point of what’s going on.)

One of the most important things missing from the coverage of this situation is context. The church’s American hierarchy did not initiate a confrontation over this matter. Rather, a handful of relatively obscure and reckless prelates -- just four out of the nation’s 300 Catholic bishops -- have walked into a controversy fueled by political partisans tied to the Republican Party.

The sequence of events began late last month in Rome, when Cardinal Francis Arinze, the prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, held a press conference to announce the clarification of certain liturgical practices involving the Eucharist, as Catholics call Communion.

Pretty intramural stuff.

But in the question-and-answer session that followed, a couple of correspondents for conservative U.S. news organizations repeatedly badgered the Nigerian cardinal about whether American politicians who cast votes for abortion rights should be allowed to receive the sacrament. A weary Arinze finally said that there is a Catholic Church in the United States, it has bishops and the issue was theirs to deal with pastorally.

That gave the American right the opening it had been looking for. For some time, an influential group of conservative Catholic laypeople has sought to use the abortion issue as a two-edged sword: As theological traditionalists, they want to use electoral politics to achieve within the church what they otherwise cannot obtain -- a purge of those who disagree with them. As social conservatives, they hope to use the church’s theology to win through religion what they cannot achieve by politics -- alienating Catholics from the Democratic Party, whose platform is broadly in agreement with the bishops on a host of social and moral issues.

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A league of conservatives

The most prominent of these activists is Deal Hudson, publisher of the conservative Catholic magazine Crisis and an advisor on Catholic issues to both President George W. Bush and the GOP. This week he told both the New York Times and the conservative website NewsMax.com that Kerry should be excommunicated for his support of abortion rights.

Hudson’s most visible ally in this is Bishop Michael J. Sheridan of Colorado Springs, who has issued a pastoral letter insisting that Communion should be denied officeholders who favor abortion rights, stem cell research, euthanasia and same-sex marriage -- and to anybody who votes for them.

The press, and particularly cable news networks, love the “Sheridan vs. Kerry” story. After all, it has both the elements American journalists like to see in a story about the Catholic Church. First, there’s the old confrontation between individual conscience and ecclesiastical authority that appeals to every latent anti-Catholic stereotype that Americans loyal to Rome don’t think for themselves. Better yet, it’s a question that involves sexual ethics. Readers can decide for themselves whether the church is as preoccupied with sex as the U.S. press makes it seem, but no one can doubt the media’s obsession with the church’s alleged obsession.

All but buried in the attention given Hudson, Sheridan et al are the quiet voices of other, far more experienced and influential prelates. Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles, for example, said there will be no denial of Communion in his archdiocese. Last week, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, D.C., wrote in his archdiocesan newspaper that he too opposes withholding the sacrament. Moreover, he pointed out that during a recent visit to the Vatican, “it was clear that so many of the highest authorities in the church are in agreement with my position.”

Archbishop John Vlazny of Portland wrote in the Catholic Sentinel that while he believes public dissenters from church teachings ought to refrain from reception of Communion of their own volition, “As a pastor, I find it difficult to make a public judgment that any person is ‘unfit’ or ‘unworthy’ ... of the sacrament. Should Catholics who choose to vote for pro-choice politicians refrain from reception of the Holy Communion? If they vote for them precisely because they are pro-choice, I believe they should refrain from reception of Holy Communion.... But if they are voting for that particular politician because, in their judgment, other candidates fail significantly in some matters of great importance, for example, war and peace, human rights and economic justice ... then reception of Holy Communion seems both appropriate and beneficial.”

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The wrong emphasis

There it goes again -- that inconvenient nuance, that recourse to moral reasoning, when good old-fashioned authoritarian diktat would simplify the story. There’s never a good auto-da-fe around when you need one.

Add opposition to capital punishment and a call for universal healthcare to Archbishop Vlazny’s list and you’ve pretty well covered the issues on which the American Catholic bishops are unable to get a serious hearing in the U.S. press. But given the media’s sudden preoccupation with Vatican pronouncements, how is it that if you want to read the most important story out of Rome this week, you have to go to a paper published in London?

On the front page of this weekend’s edition of the Tablet, England’s oldest Catholic newspaper, there is this: “The American President, George W. Bush, will be asked by the Pope at their Vatican meeting on 4 June to stop basing his policies in the Middle East on the use of force, a leading curial cardinal said this week.” According to Cardinal Pio Laghi, former papal nuncio to the U.S. and a frequent messenger between the Vatican and the White House, the pontiff wants a multilateral peacekeeping force in Iraq, “one that is not under those who organized the war.”

According to the cardinal, the pope intends to remind Bush that “the end never justifies the means, respect for life must always be honored and that struggle against terrorism does not justify giving up the principles of the state of law.”

Meanwhile, Reuters reports that in the forthcoming issue of Inside the Vatican magazine, Cardinal James Francis Stafford, a senior American prelate serving in the Roman curia, will denounce the torture of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers and intelligence agents. “Is this what American democracy is producing? Men and women who, just below the surface, are barbarians?” asks Stafford, who enjoys a close relationship with the pope.

Why a letter from an obscure Colorado bishop somehow trumps the admonitions of Pope John Paul II and one of his closest advisors as a campaign issue as a newsworthy item is something on which editors and producers might wish to reflect.

They might begin that process with another of Father Murray’s observations on the American scene: “Today’s barbarian may wear a Brooks Brothers suit and carry a ball-point pen. In fact, even beneath the academic gown there may lurk a child of the wilderness, untutored in the high tradition of civility, who goes busily and happily about his work, a domesticated and law-abiding man, engaged in the concoction of a philosophy to put an end to all philosophy.”